Writing Out of School
 
Peter Gunn
 
In the third Rome discourse of 1974, Lacan addresses us, analysts, in the form of what is, now, a call from beyond: ‘Everything depends on whether the real insists…Psychoanalysts who are not dead, letter to follow!’ The following year in the course of the cartel study days of the École freudienne de Paris, Lacan said, in effect, that to the extent that it functions as a symptom of the psychoanalytic school, the cartel is sustained by writing that outside. I am a member of the Freudian School of Melbourne, but I also convene a small group which, though not part of that school, has a strong relationship with it. One in this group is not a member of the school. Yet it was, at one point, my blunder which obliged her to insist on the function of writer; that function being irreducible, for psychoanalysis, to the individuality of an author. Drawing on the work of Lacan, primarily from the 1970’s, this paper will work the proposition that, whether or not such a group can sustain the name it has been given. It is in this way that, functioning as supplement to the school, it, in turn, sustains the transmission of psychoanalysis. 
 
Keywords: Psychoanalysis; school; cartel; group; transmission